Daniel Negreanu's Small-ball puts the Power in your Hold'em

Other books go over basic preflop guidelines with little explanation for the intricacies of postflop play. They never move beyond “mix it up,” “value bet,” “catch over-aggressive players in bluffs,” and other basic sayings few authors go very far to explain. Aside from a few gems from Sklansky and his team, not until Harrington's tournament and cash game series did we see detailed examples of postflop strategies. Earlier authors focused on the simple line of thought associated with world class play: outplay your opponent.

What they failed to do was discuss the variables necessary to determine:

1.If we have the best hand in murky situations
2.If we do have the best hand, what lines of play extract the most value?
3.If we don't have the best hand, what situations and players can we exploit to turn our hand into a successful bluff?
4.What kinds of variables are necessary so we can exploit similar situations?

What we need is a book that addresses the weaknesses so many other books promote.

That's where Daniel Negreanu's Power Hold'em comes in, and where we jump ahead to it's real gem: Small-ball.

Small-ball is a style meant to confuse your opponent and give you maximum value. It is a style employed by many of the smartest, most successful tournament players including Gus Hansen, Phil Ivey, and our author, Daniel Negreanu. As Negreanu states, when you watch a small-ball player, “you will notice that he appears to be in control of the table, yet at the same time, seems to be playing with reckless abandon, giving little thought to the strength of his starting hand.”

Daniel Negreanu's small-ball section details a myriad of complex postflop decisions. He wants us to play as many hands as possible to put us in as many profitable situations as we want. The more hands we play, the more situations we must be able to exploit or we will become exploited ourselves. As such, the author must provide vivid examples of how to take advantage of common but complicated streets based off specific player tendencies, board textures, and typical methods of exploiting how certain hands react to different boards.

Once we move beyond the monkey play of getting it all in with the nuts, a player's skill becomes dependent not just on how to play his hand but on how to play his opponent. The message of other advanced strategists has been to read what hand your opponent has. Small-ball takes this a step further with the axiom: Don't play what your opponent has. Play what your opponent doesn't have.

Building on this axiom, Negreanu explains perhaps the most revolutionary concept in his book: “bluffing outs,” a strategy that calls for us to determine the true odds of drawing out on our opponent as well as what cards we can bluff with. Negreanu stresses that advanced plays such as these require advanced reads. We must observe if an opponent is capable of folding, and if so what hands will he fold to what situations. Unless we have noticed a player can lay down pocket Aces to a low, 4-card straight board, it's best to just concede the hand and pick a better spot. But given we have a read, adding bluffing outs into our decision can turn a difficult fold into a clear call.

Players immersed in Negreanu's later sections may misconstrue some of the plays he suggests as too passive to succeed, but it's a style that's allowed him to go deep in numerous tournaments while his opponents' over-aggressive styles often lead them to either build a big stack, or more often to just bust out. Small-ball wants us to get maximum value for our legitimate hands as well as our bluffs, and Negreanu insists that sometimes means taking a small risk with big hands for bigger rewards.

For example, Negreanu suggests often just calling a preflop raise in position with big pairs like Jacks or Tens, while common discussions of such situations almost always advocate reraising. In his section on Turn play, he suggests check/calling or checking behind big but marginal hands that unfortunately cannot withstand a bluff.

Critics of these sections may note that not betting the turn fails to protect our hand as well as misses potential value, but as Negreanu points out, noting player tendencies and board textures allows us to put our opponent on a hand and determine spots in which we are well ahead or way behind. If our opponent only has 3 or 4 outs, it is pointless to create a situation that could deter our opponent from proceeding with the worst hand, or worse, failing to convince him to bluff with what he or she thinks is the best hand.

A small-ball player utilizes a mix of aggressive and passive strategies because, at the end of the day, the small-ball player wants to still be in the tournament with a stack that seems to have grown on its own.

Unfortunately, the rest of the book does not stack up. With all due respect to the contributing authors to Power Hold'em, their sections fail by following the same trend as their predecessors. Too many poker players are beyond learning a hand ranking chart, and those that aren't have many other books and websites to learn such basics. Televised poker games until recently utilized sports commentators. At best poker amateurs, those commentators are dropping off, replaced by professional poker players, reflecting an overall trend of increasing sophistication in both players and viewers of the game. The poker audience includes more than trained monkeys, and they are hungry for the advanced strategies found in the small-ball section of Daniel Negreanu's Power Hold'em.

If you're frustrated because you rarely go deep in tournaments, confused because your bluffs never work, sad because no one ever pays off your big hands, and eager to join a group of players that make poker seem effortless, you need to buy this book.